Friday, March 18, 2016

Musah Muhammad lives between the dump and the stagnant lagoon. His is unequivocally the worst bit of land in Sodom and Gomorrah, a freshly reclaimed patch of silt and trash. It would likely be one of the first cleared once the dredging starts, so people keep treating it like an open-air toilet. There is a crust of fat, iridescent blowflies on every single surface.

Musah spent months sleeping out in the open on the dump, under the two diggers abandoned during the last attempt to dredge the lagoon. He was once attacked by packs of rats as he slept, and another time woke up to find himself lying next to corpses that had floated to the surface of the water. Everybody said he’d get killed, but he survived.